In Priscilla, She’s the Girl Who Has Everything — Except Actual Power
Sofia Coppola makes films about sad, wealthy white women the way that Martin Scorsese makes movies about gangsters — sometimes, but not with anywhere near the consistency of the version of the filmmaker who exists in the public’s imagination. The Lisbon sisters of her feature-film debut, The Virgin Suicides, were, pointedly, the daughters of a Grosse Pointe math teacher and his wife, regular suburban girls elevated to mythic in the memories of the boys who idolized them from afar. The angstless teens in The Bling Ring live in a universe parallel to the celebrities whose existences they covet, until they figure out that they can break through by breaking in and helping themselves to the trappings of all that Hollywood wealth. The schoolteachers and students of The Beguiled cling to their class status only through an act of will, performing gentility like a ritual to ward off the war raging outside the gates of the crumbling plantation house in which they’re barely getting by. Still, she’s Sofia Coppola, muse to Marc Jacobs and namesake of a line of canned sparkling wine, who made her acting debut as an infant in her father’s The Godfather and riled up Cannes by portraying Marie Antoinette as an overindulged adolescent. The temptation to reduce her work down to rich-girl problems is always going to be irresistible to some, even if it’s not fair.
It’s more accurate to say that her films are about privilege without power, something she’s explored not just through female characters but as a facet of femininity itself. The positions and the luxuries her characters enjoy tend to come from their proximity to men able to bestow them — they’re wives (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette), or daughters (Somewhere, On the Rocks), or objects and wellsprings of desire (The Virgin Suicides, The Beguiled). She makes movies about women who are picked, ones who’ve been raised expecting to be treasured for their status, beauty, delicacy, youth, and fecundity — and their near-uniform whiteness is certainly entwined with all this — and who’ve been affirmed in those beliefs, until they aren’t. Coppola is our reigning auteur of girlishness, but while she revels in the quality onscreen, she portrays it as a cotton-candy-pink dream from which we will eventually wake up, whether by getting hurt by a man or by a furious crowd crying for your head outside the palace.
To be a girl is to be shielded by everything you don’t know, which may be a luxury for a while but will always turn out to be more of a liability. And Priscilla Beaulieu, the focus of Coppola’s new film Priscilla, knows little indeed when she meets Elvis Presley at the U.S. Air Force base in Germany where both he and her father were stationed in 1959. Coppola cannily chose the diminutive, baby-faced Cailee Spaeny to be her star, and Spaeny deftly guides Priscilla over a decade-long journey into a strange marriage and, ultimately, out of it, but the most important quality she brings to the character is a juvenility that’s downright confrontational. Priscilla is first introduced in sensory fragments — bare feet on a pink carpet, winged eyeliner, Aqua Net — of the person she’ll become as a resident of Graceland, but when we first see her in full, perched at the counter of the base’s social club, her face is that of a child. The marvel of Priscilla is in its dual awareness, how it’s able to immerse us in the bubble-bath-balmy perspective of a teenager experiencing an astonishing bout of wish fulfillment and, at the same time, always allow us to appreciate how disturbing what’s happening actually is.
Coppola opts for a lush, anachronistic soundtrack, and didn’t get the rights to use Elvis Presley’s music, which in the film doesn’t play like an omission so much as it does a statement. Priscilla is based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, and it’s firmly her story, not that of her superstar spouse. The Elvis in the film, played by Jacob Elordi with a mercurial hunkiness, is almost entirely domestic anyway, and when we do eventually see him onstage, he’s shot from behind and at a distance, as though his allure as a performer has receded into the abstract. That’s the aspect of the man Priscilla is familiar with when she first meets him at a party at his German rental house, but it’s one she’s shut out of once he brings her to join him at Graceland with all squishy reassurances to her parents that she’ll be chaperoned and enrolled in a Catholic high school to finish her degree. Priscilla may be Elvis’s chosen girl, but that means she needs to, as he tells her, “keep the home fires burning” while he heads off to set or on tour, leaving her to parse tabloid rumors for the truth about what he might be up to while there. To be selected as Elvis’s eventual wife means that Priscilla becomes one of the things he expects to be waiting for him when he comes back, and the shots of Spaeny drifting by herself around Graceland in all of its empty, garish splendor are some of the movie’s most iconic. When she sits out on the lawn in the sun, playing with the puppy she was given as company, she’s scolded for making a display of herself to the fans who cluster outside.
If girlhood is a dream, Priscilla is a film about fighting to not wake up for as long as possible, despite the increasing intrusions of uglier realities. This is rendered literally during Priscilla’s first visit to Memphis, where Elvis gives her one of the pills he’s been taking with promises that it will help her sleep, leaving her insensate for 48 hours — and all she can think of when she wakes up is that it’s two days less of the trip for her to enjoy. It’s obvious to us that Terry West (Luke Humphrey), the solicitous officer who initially approaches Priscilla about meeting Elvis, is actually trolling around for pretty girls to offer the star, and when Elvis invites Priscilla to see his room not long after that first meeting, Terry’s wife, Carol (Deanna Jarvis), quips to a friend that they can go home now. Elvis dictates the pace of their sexual life, as well as how he wants his future bride to dress (she should wear solid colors only) and look (she should dye her hair darker to make her eyes pop). Priscilla isn’t a fool, but she’s acutely aware of how easily she could be expelled from her unlikely romance. When Elvis’s service is up, he brings her with him to the airport to say good-bye as he goes back to the U.S., and she goes from being at his side in the car to being pressed into the cluster of women clutching photos and waiting to see their idol — reduced, in a second, to just another member of the audience.
Priscilla is an uncomfortable and thoroughly engaging watch, one that is most interesting in the context of Coppola’s filmography. Priscilla isn’t just a girl who was picked; she was one of the most picked girls of all time, and the film is unsparing about the vast power differential between her and her celebrity lover, as well as the surreality of the bifurcated life that takes her from partying alongside Elvis and his entourage at night to dozing off in high school surrounded by whispering classmates in the day. There is, nevertheless, a voluptuousness to those sequences, as the pair giggle in bumper cars together, or kiss in front of Roman candles, or jaunt off to Vegas, or take photos of each other in bed while locked away together for days. Priscilla is a teenage fantasy and wouldn’t work without acknowledging the headiness of being romanced by the most famous man in the country, though it’s telling that the film feels thinner and more rushed as its main character tires of her husband’s acting out and compartmentalizing of her within his life and realizes she can push back — including a triumphant scene of wearing a print dress. It’s not that Coppola is unwilling to depict Priscilla’s self-actualization, but it does seem to interest her much less than those all-consuming early days when Priscilla is pulled from her everyday life as a schoolgirl and brought to live in a Tennessee palace by a modern-day prince. Fairy tales always have much darker origins than the versions we’re told as children, but Priscilla is most vibrant when it’s holding onto some of that naïve enchantment, the harder truths only there at the edges.
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